Hack the planet!

Because we're still working our way through the latest tip jar, it's time for some free fiction. Hooray!

Arthur Harrington is having a hell of a time. He's always been among the most sheltered of the current generation, thanks to inheriting more than a few incubus tricks from his father, but not getting the control to keep them from backfiring at random. He used to be okay with that.

Then Sarah got hurt, and he couldn't go to help her.

Now he's climbing the walls in Oregon, looking for a way to make things better, and slamming endlessly into the walls of linear space and missing information. How do you repair a cuckoo's mind when no one understands how it works in the first place?

You can download "IM" now from the InCryptid short fiction page. This story chronologically takes place after Half-Off Ragnarok, and is better read after you've read the book. (Obviously I can't control this, but hey, I can give recommendations.) This is more of a vignette than a full narrative; it's a necessary scene to move things into place, but please don't go in looking for something huge and plot-ty. It won't be there. I'm still really excited about what is there.

This also serves as your discussion post.

A few notes on T-shirts.

For those of you who missed it, we opened orders for a new run of Wicked Girls shirts this past weekend, as well as the first-ever run of "My Story Is Not Done" shirts (for those of you who have asked for something a little more gender-neutral). Instructions on ordering, and what our options are, are all lain out on that initial post. Kate, using the "seananmerch" account, is reaching out now to confirm people's requests.

Now, the notes.

We cannot provide any special mailing options.

A few people have offered to pay extra for expedited shipping or tracking, and that's swell, but we can't. We are not a store, and the size of these shirt runs means that we have enough trouble just feeding them through the post office as all-the-same. The only way we would be able to offer other postage options would be to cap the shirt run at something around 50, and a) we've already passed that point, and b) no. I can only handle this about once every two years, and capping things like that would be mean.

We mean it when we say we can't promise delivery before October.

We opened this order period as early as we did because we want to be able to get the shirts back from the printer and shoved into envelopes before I leave for Europe in early August, but there are a lot of moving parts involved, and it's possible the printer will miss the deadline for mailing by as little as a day or as much as two weeks. If the shirts hit while I'm out of the country, they're not going to be mailed until October. We will not give refunds in September because you expected a shirt in August. I'm being really upfront about how long this could take, and this is part of why. Which brings us to...

I am not a store; we are not making any money off of this.

The last two shirt runs have netted cost of shirts + cost of postage and packing materials + one pizza party for the people who pack the shirts to mail. I am not a big shiny clothing manufacturer who prints her own shirts and can afford a shit-ton of extras. Teefury can do $11 shirts because they print their own and have runs well in excess of anything I've ever done. I am fighting to keep from needing to raise prices for these short bespoke runs. This is why I request non-CC PayPal and do my best to avoid transaction fees, which nibble away at the already very narrow overage.

Kate and I are both going to be as open and responsive as we possibly can be; transparency is best in a situation like this one. But please, please don't buy a shirt if you're going to approach it like buying something from Hot Topic. We're not that kind of operation.

Thank you.